The subject invention pertains to improvements in book binders of the so-called hard cover type, and more particularly pertains to new techniques and structures by which old books, from which the covers have been torn off, and new books being bound for the first time can be bound quickly and easily.
Book binding has been a very slowly advancing art for many centuries. There have been no radical changes in the book binding art for many, many years.
The most common method of mounting stitched or stapled, bound pages of a book in the outer covering--the binder composed of front and rear cover panels and the spine--is to attach relatively heavy, outermost sheets of the bound pages to the inside faces of the front and rear cover panels. The sheets which hold the bound pages in the binder are respectively once-folded sheets with one "page" in the binding and the other "page" secured to the inside face of the cover panel--the fold serving as the hinge between the bound pages and the respective cover panels. Books which are used repeatedly, e.g., library books, reference books, dictionaries, cook-books, manuals, etc. tend ultimately to tear at the fold and then either require a new binder or other remedial measures to re-bind the pages in the old binder, if it is not damaged or too worn.
Therefore, the binders of the subject invention have widespread use as a re-binder of worn or torn bound volumes. Another use is that of serving as the original binder for new books.
Almost all books with hard covers are bound by printing two, side-by-side pages of the book on one or both sides of a paper sheet, which is then folded vertically midway between the side-by-side printed pages. A number of these folded sheets are assembled in page number sequence, and the group of sheets are stitched at their collective fold lines to a spine backing by a vertical line of stitching. Then another group of folded sheets, again with numerical page sequence, are assembled and stitched at their collective fold lines to the spine backing in a vertical line of stitching next to the last line of stitching.
With the strips of the invention used as tabs through which the pages are stitched or stapled transversely to the plane of the pages, fold lines between pages are not required. Single pages can be bound together by the transverse stitching or stapling.